Icarus
by Antigone.Rose
Summary: Shepard is burning on the edge of creation. (These are her thoughts as she falls.) ME3 ending


She is falling to earth.

The sky is darkening. Everything is still and burning and she is falling, flying towards the surface of the world far below. Nothing slows her descent.

_So this is how it ends._

She is beyond all recognition. Her name is all that remains. _Shepard_, she thinks numbly as the sky above burns,_ that's my name_. She holds the pieces of herself together as best she can. _That's who I was_.

Shepard's hair is _lightdarkcurlystraighshortlo ng_. Shepard is _beautifulterriblekindcruel_.

(these are her thoughts as she falls to earth)

_I exist_. Shepard closes her eyes against the stinging wind and rails against death, against fate, against the reality that everything up until now hasn't mattered.

_I fought. I fought and sometimes I won_. Shepard thinks of the reaper ship, of Saren and of Rannoch. _And sometimes I lost_. She thinks of Mordin and of Legion and of dying that first time.

_And I was human_. She is crying, maybe, or maybe she isn't. She opens her eyes again. The cybernetics are failing. The edges of her vision are going black._ I wanted and I had and I lost and I...I..._

There is so much _more_ now. The sky is dark and huge and the stars are coming out. They twinkle and shine, tiny and alien and beyond her reach. _Those stars were mine, once_. She forces her eyes to stay open and she remembers and maybe they were right, maybe the Normandy was her one true love...

Her fingers squeeze around an imaginary gun and she tightens a finger of the imaginary trigger. _I survive, I endure_. She closes her eyes and feels her body heavily, feels the parts that are hers by birth and the parts that Cerberus gave to her, forced on her. Parts that are now failing. _I am that which remains._

_(everything would have been easier if they just left her dead.)_

Not anymore. There is no god in this machine, no way for her to take back this leap, to stop herself from falling. She has been dead before. Maybe she can cheat the universe once. She doesn't think that she has it in her to do it twice.

Shepard is remarkable, but she is not a god. She is mortal, but she dares to do what others fear to. Braves places no one else would dare go. Takes on all comers, throws herself into the fray without looking back.

There is a part of her that lives only for battle, only for the fight. That part is close to all-encompassing now. Is there a Shepard beyond the one that exists on the battlefield? It's been called an art, the way she wields her gun. It's been called pathetic, the way she struggles through relationships that always seem to end with leaving or being left.

_This is what you were made to do_, they say.

**(Her mouth tastes like metal and salt and blood.)**

That is her legacy. She is not exceptionally talented or skilled in combat, not really. Her redeeming quality is the fact that she is brave. She does not let fear stop her. Shepard runs in, gun held high, eyes full of fire. She does what she needs to, has to. No one else will.

**s****_pectre US, specter [ˈspɛktə]_**

**_n_**

_1. a ghost; phantom; apparition_

_2. a mental image of something unpleasant or menacing; the spectre of redundancy_

_[from Latin spectrum, from specere to look at]_

Sometimes, she forgets that she was important before all this started. Before she became the universe's only hope, she was humanity's shining star. Commander Shepard, first human to be named a spectre.

A spectre...merely an apparition, something to be feared and whispered about. Never something real. Never permanent. It's been a long while since she'd actually thought about the word's actual meaning. It's fitting, then, for her to disappear like this.

Dissolving into the atmosphere. They'll never find her body.

**"Death is the end of life; ah why  
Should life all labour be? "**

Ashley liked Tennyson. Scraps of poetry float around in Shepard's head and she thinks fleetingly of the girl who she failed to save. Ashley was brave, determined and headstrong. Ashley died without fear.

**"All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave  
In silence - ripen, fall, and cease;"**

Ashley had faith, believed in good and evil, heaven and hell. Shepard's rapidly failing eyes spin in her head, taking in dark sky and burning earth and the last things she will ever see. Faith...it's not really something she's ever put much thought into before.

**"Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease."**

She has faith in her gun, faith in sweat, blood and bone. She has faith in her people. She has faith in Tali and Garrus and Joker, the people who have stuck with her through everything, through Saren and Cerberus and the end of the world. She has faith that some people (Kaiden, Jack, Miranda, Jacob, Grunt) are good at heart, even if they don't show it all the time.

She has faith in humanity, in all the races of the universe. She believes they will endure this. She had faith that they are strong, will be strong. She puts her faith in that.

Could there really be a God on high, someone judging her with a cold, analytical gaze? She thinks of Reapers, of beings with almost unlimited power. She's killed Reapers. She's killed the closest things to gods she's ever known. Heaven...hell...are her choices in life being weighed and measured? Is all the good being tallied against all the bad?

She doesn't like that idea. Doesn't like the opinion that, after all this...after everything she's done, it comes down to someone else's choice.

Her vision is all blackness now. Swirls of color dance behind her eyelids. Faces of those she has known, loved and died for ripple past like the wind on the surface of water. _I failed you_. She thinks._ I'm sorry_.

**_deus ex ma·chi·na (ks mäk-n, -nä, mk-n)_****  
****_n._**

_1. In Greek and Roman drama, a god lowered by stage machinery to resolve a plot or extricate the protagonist from a difficult situation._

_2. An unexpected, artificial, or improbable character, device, or event introduced suddenly in a work of fiction or drama to resolve a situation or untangle a plot._

_3. A person or event that provides a sudden and unexpected solution to a difficulty._

The Crucible was supposed to be the solution. It was supposed to a giant kill-switch, something that would end the Reapers with no questions asked. Instead, Shepard is falling through space as the synthetics that keep her alive begin to fail.

Maybe the Reapers are gone and maybe things are better than they were a moment ago, but Shepard is still falling, still dying. Everything is darkness. In this moment, everything hurts.

Once upon a time, she was the impossible solution. Just an ordinary human thrown into the fray and made to do the extraordinary. But all the tricks up her sleeve mean nothing now. There's nothing left to do, nothing left to try. There's no clever solution.

She is going to die here. There is no other way. Walking away this time...it's beyond impossible.

Impossible had never meant much to Shepard. The word is thrown at her so often that it has more or less lost it's meaning. _Impossible... nothing really is,_ she thinks sometimes. She's died once already and then lived through a mission everyone had considered suicide. _Impossible, _she thinks other times_, fuck that. _

_ Shepard is a_** ( result not found )**

_ paragon/renegade...choose one, Shepard._

_...she never truly decides._

Far above, the stars are burning and so is the sky and Shepard knows even if she can't see them. For so long, it was fighting and almost dying and actually dying...what comes next? What comes after?

She is lost. Everything is fading and going away. Shepard is becoming a phantom, burning on the edge of creation. There is no more going back. Her heart hammers against her ribs.

She puts her faith in the universe.

_(I'm sorry)_

No more fingers, no more toes. No more fight, no more impossible. No more Commander Shepard. She would open her eyes if she could. Once more, she would like to see her stars.

She puts her faith in the stars.

_paragon...renegade...she never did make that choice._

_(these are her thoughts as she falls)_

* * *

A/N: So...yes. I just finished ME3 and now my heart is sad. So...here are all of my feels. Review and all that.

Disclaimer: All your Mass Effect are belong to Bioware.


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